In Search of Musine Kokalari: history, memory and law

My project addresses the way the law uses and writes history, as well as being a site of memory and commemoration for past injustices committed by a predecessor regime. My case study is the twentieth-century Albanian dictatorship (1944-1991). My project has four objectives. The first is to research into the personal background of Albania’s first pre-Communist female writer, Musine Kokalari (1917-1983). Musine’s image is included in present-day Albanian legal and historical discourses about the dictatorship. Secondly, my project will examine the trial transcripts of the 1946 trial of political dissidents, in which Musine Kokalari was a defendant. My project’s third objective is to place the legal and historical discourses about the 1946 trial and the defendant within a theoretical and contextual framework that includes transitional criminal justice and the Balkan and European experiences. Finally, it aims to critically investigate how these discourses may assist Albanian, Balkan and European societies to grasp the social, political and historical context of the law and how the Musine Kokalari case may help Albanian, Balkan and European societies appreciate the ideologies of history and the interplay of memory and history.